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	Gods Graves Glyphs	Thanks ConservativeMind! The Nemesis hypothesis reconsidered, from the look of it. :') The Ries Basin in Germany is an impact crater from about 15 million years ago. IMHO the fact is, there's no periodicity to these events, they happen when they happen, a possibility which creates a lot of anxiety among those suckled on the teats of uniformitarianism. Yes, I did just want to use SOTT in a sentence for the first time in my life. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother, and Ernest_at_the_Beach
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Thanks ConservativeMind!

Nemesis: Does the Sun Have a 'Companion'?
by Robert Roy Britt
03 April 2001
Richard A. Muller... a physicist at University of California at Berkeley... [has] ideas... generally rooted in solid science and genius extrapolation... But Muller's biggest idea is a real Nemesis. Or so he claims. Like a thorn in the side of mainstream researchers, Muller's Nemesis theory -- that our Sun has a companion star responsible for recurring episodes of wholesale death and destruction here on Earth -- seems to reemerge periodically like microbes after a mass extinction. It's a theory that has many detractors. And it's a theory that has been beaten down and left for dead in the minds of most scientists... Muller's idea for Nemesis came to him 1983. Luis Alvarez, then an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and his son Walter had recently put forth the theory that a giant impact had wiped out the dinosaurs... Around the same time, two other researchers had suggested yet another controversial idea, that mass extinctions occurred at regular intervals -- every 26 million years or so. Scientists immediately folded the ideas into a new and breathtaking possibility: Impacts by space rocks were causing massive global species destruction every 26 million years.
Searching for a Tenth Planet
by Jeff Kanipe
Oct 15 1999
The main justification for the search was made when discrepancies in the predicted positions of the outer planets Uranus and Neptune kept cropping up with alarming regularity. Uranus has completed over two and a half orbits since its discovery in 1741, and Neptune, discovered in 1846, has completed almost one full circuit. Both planets should have accurately determined orbits by now. And yet, variations in their predicted positions, called residuals, persist. Critics, most prominent among them, British astronomer Dr. Brian Marsden with the International Astronomical Union, say that inadvertent data error is the real culprit behind the residuals, not a missing planet. In fact, says Dr. Marsden, Planet X is not a scientific problem as much as it is a psychological problem...

In the October 11 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. John Murray, an astronomer from the Open University in the United Kingdom proposed that a large object in the extreme outer realms of the solar system may be gravitationally affecting the orbits of long-period comets. He theorizes that the object would have to orbit the sun 32,000 times farther away than Earth (about 3 trillion miles) and would have to be at least as massive as Jupiter, if not more so. Given its distance, it would also be extremely faint and slow moving.

In other research, a professor of physics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Dr. John J. Matese, is making a case for the existence of a 2- to 3-Jupiter mass object orbiting some 2.3 trillion miles from the sun. In a paper soon to be published in the planetary journal, Icarus, Dr. Matese asserts that this object, too, has created a "concentration" of Oort cloud comets and is responsible for sending a significant number of them - perhaps as much as 25 percent - into the inner solar system... Dr. Matese's theory focuses on different aspects of long-period comet orbits, but nevertheless begs the question: could the darkest corner of our solar system harbor a tenth planet or a brown dwarf? A brown dwarf, he contends, would not have been detected in the previous infrared searches, such as the one conducted by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) in the early 1980s, because the alleged planet/brown dwarf is too near the galactic plane. To ferret out such an object in that busy IR region requires greater sensitivity than IRAS possessed at the time.
A mystery revolves around the sun:
Researchers suggest that huge unseen object
orbits on fringe of solar system
by Alan Boyle
Oct 7 (1999?)
Speculation about the existence of unseen celestial companions dates back far before the discovery of Pluto in 1929... This latest hypothesis, however, is aimed at answering nagging scientific questions about how particular types of comets make their way into the inner solar system. Some comets, like Halley's Comet, follow relatively short-period orbits - circling the sun in less than two hundred years. These comets are thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt, a disk of cosmic debris that lies beyond Neptune's orbit... Even further out is the Oort Cloud, a spherical haze of comets surrounding the solar system at distances between 10,000 AU and more than 50,000 AU. That's where long-period comets such as Hale-Bopp are thought to come from. For some time, astronomers have noticed that the directional patterns of these comets are not completely random... No telescope has yet detected this object. But on the basis of its gravitational effect, John B. Murray, a planetary scientist at Britain's Open University, speculates that the object could be a planet larger than Jupiter, the biggest of the solar system's known planets... Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette say the object could be a planet or brown dwarf - that is, a dark, failed star - roughly three times the size of Jupiter and orbiting at 25,000 AU. The researchers, led by physicist John Matese, say their paper is to be published by the journal Icarus... Brian Marsden, who heads the International Astronomical Union's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams as well as the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory... expressed some skepticism about the evidence behind the latest research... Matese noted that theories proposing a correlation between extinctions on Earth and celestial orbits had fallen out of scientific favor in recent years. But he said there could be a "much more gentle" effect that links periodic changes in cratering to the solar system's oscillating motion through the galactic plane.



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